The end-to-end process of safety culture change

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Kym Bancroft, an organizational psychologist turned leading health and safety executive.

Kym walks EHS professionals through each stage of safety transformation to help them ensure they start in the right place, get the required buy-in, implement initiatives effectively and monitor the most important metrics.

Never afraid to challenge traditional approaches to HSE, Kym explains how she incorporates human-centered methodologies and psychological principles to drive evidence-based innovation. She covers diagnostics, implementation, evaluation and iteration and highlights the importance of decluttering, safety metrics, critical control work insights, learning teams and restorative culture.

Kym is currently the Head of HSE (Asia Pacific) at Serco and has a Masters’ in Applied Psychology and a Masters in Safety Leadership.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport.

In other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff. ♪ [music] ♪ Kym Bancroft is here today to talk about the end-to-end process of change. From the beginning, when an EHS professional understands that change has to happen, all the way through to implementation, evaluation, and iteration.

Kym is a passionate future state-driven HSE professional presenting more than 15 years of international experience in the industry. With a master's in applied psychology and a master's in safety leadership, Kym is currently the head of HSE Asia Pacific at Serco. Taking a contemporary approach, Kym incorporates psychological principles and human-centered methodologies with safety, innovation, and evidence-based research to drive transformation across the workplace, creating high reliability, operational excellence, and a positive workplace culture.

Welcome.

- [Kym] Thank you, Mary. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me along.

- Yeah, well, it's great to be able to talk to you. So let's get right into it. Some safety cultures are poorly developed, as our listeners will know, or just frankly, unsafe. As an organization or a safety team, how do we fix this? And where do we start?

- It's a huge challenge, isn't it, Mary? It really is, especially when you describe it like that. And, you know, it just seems so many organizations seem to struggle with safety culture, and, you know, understanding it, and then being able to change it so it's sustainable and long term. So, where to start. So, you know, in my experience, you know, almost 20 years of doing large-scale end-to-end safety transformation, I think it really needs to start, you know, in the boardroom, in the executive room, with strategy, and to really, first of all, diagnose what those challenges are.

There are so many off-the-shelf ideas you can just purchase and run with, you know, and you can sort of go, "I kind of want to change safety culture," but really, it all starts with that discovery, that diagnostic phase. So it's really worth investing in either doing the diagnostic yourself, which you can do, it feels daunting, but you could do it yourself.

Or investing in an organization that can come in and run some kind of diagnostic for you. So then you could take that back to your executive to say, "Hey, look, from a strategic perspective, we have a few challenges here, we need to improve. And here is, you know, a starting point, really, where we can leverage off to then start to build strategy, to then start to transform our safety culture." But you really need to know, you know, where you are currently and also where you want to go as well.

So there's a little bit of that, you know, I guess, you know, that phase of really understanding, and discovering, and diagnosing, to then define where we actually want to get to.

- So you've talked about establishing a compelling case for change, which is what you're describing here. Who needs to be convinced of this? So in other words, convincing the board versus the worker. So you've just talked about convincing the board, how's the best way to go about it, do you think?

- So in terms of establishing that compelling case for change. So in my experience...you know, and this idea of compelling case for change comes from John Green. I think it was originally with Laing O'Rourke, he sort of coined that term, compelling case for change, and I really picked it up and run with it, I really like it. So in terms of starting to build a compelling case for change, my suggestion would be...so you've already identified, okay, we've got a little bit of challenge here, we want to take this to the key stakeholders to then get some change happening.

So my suggestion would be is to pull in all your data points. So that would be all of your lost time, so your league and lag safety metrics. It would be your, like, employee engagement survey results, it would be your workers' comp data, your costs, your HR data, like your absenteeism and turnover.

Pull in all these different data points which can help you build a picture for where your organization is currently at. And you might actually be pleasantly surprised by it, and go, "Actually, we're actually not doing too badly here, it's just a few points we want to change." Or you might pull it together and go, "Wow, when we aggregate all this information together, there really is a compelling case for change. We really need to do something different, otherwise, if we keep doing the same thing, things really aren't going to change, we're just going to keep plateauing."

And I see that happening in organizations sometimes, where they sort of they know they need to change, they're not too sure how, but they think, "We'll just keep, you know, layering these little initiatives on top, hoping that we'll change." So I would pull all that data together. I would then cross-reference that with what the evidence is saying. So what the research is saying. So what is trending at the moment in terms of what's actually working in organizations for the key challenges you're having.

So you've got your data, and you've got the research, the industry data. And the reason why that's important is your stakeholders might want to know, well, is this just a good idea, or is it actually...is this actually embedded and rooted in some kind of evidence to say, "If we're going to invest in this, it's going to take time, money, resource," is this actually going to work? So I would take those two data points and merge them into that compelling case for change. If you have a seat at the table with the board and the executive, I would then present that information to them.

Now, no doubt, they're already aware that some change needs to occur, so this presentation shouldn't come as a surprise to them. Definitely give it as pre-reading, give as much, you know, sort of pre-work as you can. And when you present that to them, you know, given the time that you might have, really allow them the time to think this over, and discuss it, and pull it apart. They might not agree with all of this data, this data might come as a little bit of a shock to them, so they really need time to mull it over, to think about it, and to consider and discuss where to next.

It wouldn't be something that you just do in one session. So that's how I would take it to the executive and the board. You could also then create a different version of that that perhaps you might take to your frontline. So no doubt you've already done some consultation with your frontline workers, with your frontline supervisors.

So the data also needs to come from them as well. So if you've got the time, I would also consider doing, you know, some kind of ethnographic research with them, or as part of your diagnostic, very much consult with them because they're the workers at the sharp end, they're the ones who the challenges probably flow to. So it's really important to make sure their voice is heard at the table as well in that compelling case for change.

So I would then use that as a piece of communication to all areas of the organization depending on, you know, your role and how you can do that, most definitely. So that way, everyone's on the same page to go, "Hey, look, here's what's worked well in the past, here's what hasn't, we're all on the same page in terms of where that company's safety evolution is sitting at."

- I really like how you're discussing not just...a lot of the guests I've talked to have talked about sort of breaking out of that narrow safety box. And, you know, you're talking about getting data from HR, you're talking about just really getting a more holistic view, which, I think, is fantastic.

And leads me into another question. I'm jumping around a little here, but I'd like to go with the flow of what we're talking about. So you worked in the Safety Science Innovation Lab, and you implemented ethnographic research there. So you've just mentioned that as part of this sort of gathering. So why was this important?

And what kind of insights did you gain?

- It was amazing, Mary, I must say. So I didn't actually work in the lab, I actually brought the lab into the organization I was working with. So I'm very fortunate in the sense that I work in Brisbane in Queensland, where the lab has to be located at Griffith University, so literally on the doorstep. But if you wanted to use the Griffith University Safety Science Innovation Lab, it doesn't matter, they don't have to be on your doorstep, they can do that work remotely.

So I contacted Professor Sidney Dekker, who some of your listeners may have heard of. He runs the lab there with Dr. Drew Rae. And they had a researcher who was completing his Ph.D., Dr. Yop Havinger, who, again, some of your listeners may have heard of. And we had the pleasure of hosting Yop for three months to come and do this ethnographic research. So Yop went out, and he was a water industry worker, he was a sewage plant operator, he was a lab worker, an office worker for three months, you know, literally sitting out on the side of the road while these guys did their response and maintenance work, you know, in the heat and the rain, and so on and so forth.

And the reason why that's important is because he's out there actually experiencing the work as it occurs. So, you know, sometimes we don't have the time and the pleasure to do that because, you know, we've got all these other competing demands. So as much as we'd like to get out in the field, it can be challenging, but Yop had the time to do that. So Yop was able to go out and really understand the core challenges and how work is done. All of the operational constraints, the resource constraints, what works for these guys, what are their workarounds?

So we give them a procedure and we think the work...we imagine the work to happen like x, but in actual fact, it happens like y because sometimes things don't go to plan. So he was out there to discover all of that. And the core part of his discovery was around how does the safety management system that we give the workers, how does that actually create operational safety?

And we'd like to think it creates operational safety in many ways, but in some ways, it actually hinders operational safety. So his report came back and it showed us all the parts where, for example, our risk assessments or our fatigue management, or any component of that was either helping or hindering operational safety. So that report then forms part of, again, that compelling case for change, it helped form the roadmap forward.

And it helped inform the strategy going forward on, you know, what we'll actually start to do because there's many areas that we can tackle, but where our areas of priority were. We also cross-referenced these, or triangulate might be the fancy word for it, with a safety clutter survey, which is actually free online. I think it's called the Safety Clutter Scorecard.

And so we rolled that out as a survey. And that helped us identify where the clutter was in relation to the safety management system and what the frontline workers and leaders saw as the key things that were actually adding value as opposed to not. So it told us that, you know, things like risk assessments, which I know we'll talk about later on, weren't adding so much value, and the board visits that we spent a lot of time on definitely were of no use.

You know, sometimes you're investing in all these activities you think are helping, but the guys say, "No, that's number 20 in terms of value that it's adding." So yeah, doing those two activities was hugely valuable. And I've done them many times in my career or continue to do so. So yeah, a big encouragement to people who are looking to undertake safety cultural change, is to really invest as much as you can, in that diagnostic research where possible.

- I think it's common wisdom, or maybe it's not common, but to go out and sort of talk to people on the floor, see how they're doing. And you know, honestly, safety professionals are busy. If you have the resources, I think it's fantastic that you would be able to bring in an outside, you know, that specializes in ethnographic observation.

And really, just like you said, it sounds like they got into kind of every nook and cranny of theory versus reality, perhaps.

- Absolutely. Now, Mary, I think it's probably important to say there, if I can just interject, hopefully, that's okay, you know, some companies might not have the budget to do this, you know, so it's not overly cheap. And you might just have, like, a shoestring budget, right, and you might be thinking, "Well, gosh, I want to do this, but I can't afford to get the lab, you know, to do it." So you literally could do a DIY version of this.

I would take an approach like with a methodology like customer-based design, where you go out and you might have five questions that you go out and you ask a whole bunch of different groups. You ask your health safety reps, you ask your frontline workers. You know, you see, whilst you might not have a budget, you might have time to go out there and jump in a truck or go and, you know, observe a work task or actually get involved, you know, where you can safely.

And everyone's got powers of observation, everyone can ask good questions, everyone can listen. So you don't necessarily need to get the big players in to help you out, you literally could do a DIY, sort of, you know, your own version of that, I think. So I think that's important for listeners to know, that, you know, no need to be constrained by budget if that's an issue.

- Yeah, that's true, especially if this is the initial part of making your compelling case for change, then maybe the budget isn't flowing yet. You need to make that case before...

- That's right.

- ...before that happens, right. So can you give us a brief overview of your experience and how it's led you to your framework, the discovery, design, implementation, and habituation framework?

- Yeah, sure, that's a good question. So my background, so I started as an organizational psychologist, so I've got a master's in org psych. So I don't know, maybe that gave me perhaps a slightly different way to approach safety. So I didn't come in as a typical sort of safety professional through that usual career path. And early in my career, I joined a large international consultancy, so I would go to far-flung places like Yellowknife in Canada and Weipa in the far north of Queensland.

You know, all the places you'd never go to on a holiday, but where there's mining camps. And I was doing large-scale safety culture transformation. So probably very early on in my career, I realized the benefit of following a model like the one that you just described.

Whereas for some safety professionals, they come through more traditional pathways of studying as a safety advisor with a core safety qualification. Whereas I did mine in reverse. So they sort of might get sort of stuck into the more traditional safety activities and not realize that there's also these other components, you know, with that safety culture change that certainly impacts all facets of safety.

So this should certainly pervade your whole safety approach. It's not just a little safety culture part we do over here and then we do everything else in isolation, not at all, it underpins everything else. So yeah, I think it was probably that part of my career and starting in that sort of non-traditional pathway that helped me realize the benefit of doing this. And doing it well.

And then using that to leverage and uplift your whole safety approach.

- It's interesting to me all the different angles that people come from to end up at safety. Some people do sort of a formal training first. And of course, you did that as well. But like you said, that came after the psychological training. So yeah, it's interesting, all walks of life.

So tell us about the sacred cows, the assumptions and beliefs in safety management that you would like the safety industry to reexamine. Describe a few if you'd like, and explain why they're problematic.

- Sure, so I've kind of modified the definition of safety cows a little bit because the safety cow really is an idea that's held sacred inside an organization. And you wouldn't do anything to the sacred cow because it's sacred, right? So I'm sort of changing that idea of it and saying, "Look, well, no, it's safety cow, you need to take that safety cow to the boardroom and you need to slaughter it ethically.

So I'll say that I'm actually a vegan, so I don't actually mean that. But metaphorically.

- [inaudible].

- So yeah, I like to take those sacred cows, you know, the metaphorical version of it, and really challenge them, upend them, and yes, slaughter them in the boardroom and create a bit of a disruption because they're not helpful to us in safety. So every organization would have different ones.

And I think my versions of safety sacred cows are things like...I like the...I call it the metric sacred cow, which is this idea that there's only very few metrics that, you know, brilliantly tell us the state of safety in our organization.

So for most organizations, it's LTIFR and TRIFR, which are king in the boardroom. And we make this core assumption that these metrics are telling us about how safe our organization is. Which has been proven by many researchers in published empirical science-based journal articles that in actual fact, those metrics aren't telling us about the state of safety.

They're telling us about injury performance and how much lost time we've lost. But it's not actually telling us anything about how effective our critical controls are, and how critical risk is being managed, and so on and so forth. So, I like to really challenge that one. And I've done that in many boardrooms. And what I do is, I take the research to them to say, you know, there's actually...research is showing that there's actually an inverse relationship between companies who have zero harm as a statistical outcome and their fatalities.

So if it's a high-risk industry, you know, we're seeing the inverse relationship to be existing there. Which many people wouldn't think about because they think, "Hang on, having these very high metrics is actually helpful to us." So once I've sort of challenged that sacred cow, the question, then, is, is, well, what metrics do we put in place, because, you know, we need to replace it with something. So that's a whole other sort of initiative and project that you might undertake your organization on.

The other one is the...I like to call the cultural sacred cow. And what this one says is, is that, actually, it's the people that are an issue in our organization. So we've got this beautiful, big, well-written safety management system that tells everyone how to do their job safely. And if it wasn't for those "stupid" people making silly mistakes, then we wouldn't have these safety metrics which are blowing up, and people aren't getting their bonuses, and we're not hitting our targets, and the LTIFR, and so on and so forth.

And that's a really interesting assumption that organizations have, and it comes up in the way we talk about people in the organization. So you'll hear about it in meetings, "There was this accident, and it was just a silly mistake, it was human error, it's behavioral, we need to tell people to take more care." It comes up in the way perhaps HR talk about people.

It comes up in the way we overbake our policies and procedures. You know, we might have a policy on Christmas parties because we don't want people doing something silly at a Christmas party, or how to operate the toaster in the kitchen or the whole water system. So we're really over-bureaucratizing safety, we're going down to the nth degree to try to reach this impossible goal of zero.

Rather than actually understanding the systemic factors that may have contributed to the event or the hierarchy of controls and how we manage that particular event. So it comes up in many, many different ways. My suggestion for identifying your sacred cows would be to really listen. And, again, this can come out in your diagnostic work when you're going out to talk to all stakeholders in your business.

How are people talking about the employees that you have in your organization? How are they judging the safety performance of the organization? This can really help you identify what some of those assumptions are. The other thing I love to do is actually ask the leaders what their assumptions are. And sometimes people are very good at saying, "Well, actually, you know, I make an assumption that zero is possible," or, "I make an assumption that people are stupid.' So sometimes people can actually consciously identify what some of them are.

So yeah, I think it's a really worthwhile thing to do in an organization, go through, find them, and then challenge them, disrupt them, get those cows moving.

- Actually, I'm a little surprised when you say that people are often conscious of them. I mean, I assume that assumptions are blind, and some of them are, of course. But, yeah, no, that's good to hear. And it's actually just a good awareness exercise for people that you're talking to, for the safety managers.

- Sometimes no one's asked them what their assumptions were, you know, so they think, "Well, actually, what are my beliefs around safety?" And they're like, "I'm not sure." And then you give them sort of five minutes, you sort of prompt them. I've got a great video that I show of some high-risk electrical work in Canada that I show them, and it sort of then gets them thinking about safety.

And then I ask them, you know, "What are your core beliefs? What are your assumptions about safe work?" And then they think about it, and they go, "Oh, yeah," and then they come up with some. So it's probably that they've never actually been given the chance to actually talk about them or even identify them. So it's a good little exercise to run your leadership team through.

- What I wanted to ask is, what is a vanguard team? Who are these people? And why are they important?

- It's a great question. Thank you. So I follow...I wouldn't say it's necessarily outdated. But I follow John Kotter's eight stages of change loosely. And so that's, you know, how you take a company through a change management process. And in his change model, he talks about a guiding coalition. And so the guiding coalition are the people who emerge as those ones who are early adopters, they're aligned to the change that you're bringing in, and they're keen to get in and get stuck in and give it a go and make it happen.

And those people have a lot of energy, they're often influential, as I said, they're the early adopters. So when I do change, I look for those people early on, when we're starting to talk about the change that we're going to start to introduce. And I like to bring them in and bring them in as a group to say, "Look, you know, clearly, you're aligned to this, let's leverage up the energy and the enthusiasm that you have for this change."

So in my last organization, I gave them a nice name, which is Vanguard, which is the group that goes forward, you know, into war, not that it's a war, of course, but they're the ones who are at the front, advancing the cause if you like. And what I did with that Vanguard was, I started to give them more information, and more theory, and more knowledge around safety innovation and contemporary thinking in safety that really was challenging that safety paradigm.

And then I invited them to come up with what we call micro experiments relating to the change management that we were doing in safety. So for example, we'd identified that clutter was a real issue with our safety management system and we wanted to go through a decluttering process. Now, that takes time to build that little initiative out, right, it's not a quick win. But some of the guys, like, instantly saw where clutter existed inside their part of the business and they said, "Right, we're ready to go, we want do a little micro experiment, we're going to declutter in this particular aspect."

And so I was able to help them design that micro experiment. I'm really big on measuring the change, so they'd do a little bit of pre-metrics, a little bit of post-metrics. And then they would literally, you know, be given...gets empowered, not given permission, they're empowered to go ahead and get that macro experiment underway. And we had so many different ones, Mary, it was great.

We had a diverse range of micro experiments coming out of the Vanguard just for things that we're passionate about. And what it meant was we could be really agile. So whilst we're doing a bigger safety change, these guys could be really agile, they were quick to implement, they didn't need expertise as a researcher, they were able to quickly move through that specific change process. So we would then collate those micro experiments, and that would just help get the ball rolling and the energy going inside the organization for the change that we had at hand.

It was really successful.

- It sounds like a lot of fun, or it sounds you know, energetic. Did you find Vanguards or, you know, early adopters in sort of all areas? Meaning in leadership, in, you know, frontline, everywhere in between, different departments, that sort of thing.

Did you get a good mix?

- Yeah, it was really interesting, I did. So I had early adopters at the executive level. They were less inclined to come and join the Vanguard purely because of time and the demands of their role. So what I used them for was, like, the sponsor for the Vanguard. And so they would come along on a regular basis and just...sometimes they'd open the session, sometimes they'd sit in for five minutes, whatever time they had.

But that would certainly help promote it through the organization. But with the executive aside, yeah, most definitely, I found it for all levels of the organization. I had health safety representatives, I had some people from our contracting organizations come in as well, which was wonderful. Leaders, frontline leaders, and then frontline workers as well. A little bit more challenging for them to get away and join as well but we certainly tried to empower them as much as we could.

Yeah, it was very, very diverse. So you know, there was a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of organization to, you know, keep this group going and help them with their pre and post, and track the micro experiments, but we did our best to do that. And I think it really helps get those early wins, which is very important in any change management process. So my suggestion is to look for those people, they'll often just emerge, right? They'll come and tell you, "Hey, this is great. I've been waiting for this for a long time. Let's do it."

- And I can imagine they're also...because they're from diverse areas, they're planting the seed for change, they're planting the seed of enthusiasm really just for doing things a little bit differently, which is sometimes easier than doing things a lot differently all at once. So let's stir the pot a little bit. You made a switch, you mentioned, from written to verbal risk assessments.

Tell me about that and the reactions to it. You know, why did you do it? What did you learn? Give me all the details.

- Yeah, it was a big chunky project, that one on one, that myself and my team, very, very proud of. So I think it's always a global problem or challenge in that, you know, globally, we see the value in pre-task risk assessments, of course, because we need to be able to identify and manage the risk before a task.

For some reason, you know, globally, there's this common criticism of them that they can be overly bureaucratic, you know, the pre-task written part is just five pages long, can be onerous, it can be repetitive if it's a task that is the same that they do day in, day out. And I think what happens and it turns into this tick-and-flick activity. So it ends up being...so we've got this really great well-intended purpose, and it just ends up over here, you know, and the process is really not helping operational safety.

Is that a fair assumption in your part of the world, Mary? Because it's certainly used like that in Australia.

- I would say so.

- Yeah, that's probably fair to say, right? And as safety leaders, we're aware of these challenges. And, you know, the guys come and tell us, "Look, you know..." they verbally say, "Look, we're really challenged with this." And then it's sort of on us to fix it, but how do we change that? So some, we might start, you know, ordering the quality of them more, we might ask for all the written ones to come back to some poor frontline supervisor's desk and he has to enter them, you know, count them or check the quality of them.

But it's really not a long-term fix. So part of the ethnographic research that Yop did for us, it clearly came out in that research where they were working well and where the risk assessments weren't working well. So we had this really clear idea that there's drift from the work as imagined, where we think it's adding value and it's just not, it's becoming a really burdensome process.

And what the guys were telling us was that they were telling us things like, it doesn't add any value, it's just used to "cover your butt," so to speak, it's a long process for a task that we do every day, get rid of the...you know, you should get rid of the content, it's just not applicable.

Some guys even said, they just stay in the folder, you know, just get rid of them, which is really, really concerning. So what we wanted to do was go through a process of consultation with the frontline workers to redesign the process to make sure that it's actually adding value and doing what it's intended to do. So going back to that idea that I mentioned before of human-centered design, we went through that process of learning more about it, the discovery.

We spoke to the "voice of intent," which is the stakeholders who, you know, hold value in this process, like the risk team, the safety team, the executives, and so on and so forth. And then we spoke to the voice, what I call the "voice of experience," which is the frontline workers who use that process day in, day out. So we had this beautiful dataset, it was very rich in themes and ideas around how to move forward. So we did some learning teams and whatnot just to, again, further find out.

But we knew, Mary, that there was going to be a huge roadblock. And it was this, it was that people assumed that this was a legal requirement, to do this written risk assessment at the start of every task. So we heard some murmurs from different parts of the organization, going, "We would be very legally exposed if we were to remove the written part of it."

So I thought, "Okay, you know, we really need to listen to those concerns, we need to dive into them." You can't just, you know, put it to the side and ignore it because that's not going to work out for that stakeholder. So I engaged a...one of them was actually Australia's best safety lawyer, Michael Tooma. He works for an organization, it is an international organization, called Clyde & Co.

And he came in and he did a little bit of a review for us of the Australian legislation just to tell us, is this going to expose us? And I'll just put a little quote here he said, the summary of his work was to say that, "There is no express obligation to implement documented risk assessment processes in the Australian WHS Act, regulations, or code of practice. Whatever obligation exists relates to proactively managing the risks. And documentation of that process is only necessary if it assists in traceability of implementation of risk controls and the review of the effectiveness of those controls."

So he said, right, for confined space for diving, you must write it down, everything else, it doesn't have to be written down. So then, with that, we sort of had the license, yeah, to go to the frontline workers and co-design a new risk assessment process. And what they came up with was called the CHRAT. So they named it, it was the Conversation Hazard Risk Awareness Tool. And so it was basically a guided conversation tool to assess and manage the risks in the workplace.

We came up with little pocket cards for them, we had a little electronic version on their phones. And so at the start of every task, they would go through the CHRAT, in the same way they used to do the written one. They could take photos. If something was a little bit different for that particular task, they might, you know, text the supervisor and just say, "Hey, we're seeing something different than we normally would. What are your thoughts on the controls here?"

And we encouraged them to, where possible, sort of document it electronically if that made them feel better. So yeah, the results are fantastic. I think the co-design certainly helped that. The guys started rolling it out, and toward the end of it, we did our post, and they said, "Look..." the feedback was, "Finally, a safety change that doesn't make our life harder." "This is a great tool that encourages collaboration on the job."

They loved it, they said it was easy to remember and encourage conversation about the stuff that really mattered. So all in all, it was a successful project. I've since left that organization, but if I was still there, I'd go back and just do that six-month review, just to check that it was all still working as intended.

- It's interesting, you know, writing is a form of communication. And in this case, it was hindering communication. It sounds like...I mean, not hindering it so much as the fact that a conversation is just far more...it's going to communicate far more effectively, and especially, you know, bring forward edge cases, is what they call them in business.

But just you know, different contexts, like, well, today, something is working differently, or, you know, so and so's not feeling well. I mean, there's all kinds of variables that can come up. So, according to one of your talks, the implementation process breaks into five themes. So I was hoping that you could go through and talk about them.

I'll list them quickly. Decluttering, safety metrics, critical control, work insights, learning teams, and restorative culture. So you have touched on some of that, but let's just go through and see if there's anything you'd like to add. So the first one was decluttering.

- So I'll just quickly preface to say those themes came from that diagnostic work that we did early on. So, you know, aIl safety teams, we have limited budget, we have limited resource, there's a lot to do, it's a very busy role. So we wanted just to prioritize what those themes were going to be. And, you know, where do we start on this transformation?

So that's where that information came from. So I wouldn't necessarily do that in every organization, it really just depends on, you know, what the needs are of the organization. So yeah, they were the five. Decluttering comes from the work that Dr. Dave Provan and Dr. Drew Rae have done on safety work and "The Safety of Work." So I would definitely recommend them as a guest speaker, Mary, in the future.

And they've written great research papers on decluttering, right, and their model is fantastic. And so you could write a whole strategy of decluttering from their research. So just google the names, and you'll find their research. And people think decluttering is just, you know, doing a bit of a Marie Kondo and stripping stuff back, but it's not.

It's about making sure the safety management system is actually creating operational safety. So you actually might need to add stuff. So that's some decluttering. So we started the process of decluttering our whole safety management system. I also love UX mapping by Klaus Hofer. Again, another great guest speaker. And he's all about rewriting your actual policies and procedures so that they work with cognitive, human psychology.

So that any worker, regardless of their reading level or cognitive ability, can actually understand this policy and know what they need to do to stay safe. So that's decluttering. Safety metrics, you know, as I've sort of touched on, we're making the assumption that those couple of metrics of LTIFR and TRIFR were telling us about the state of safety, which they really weren't.

So I went through a process with the organization to redesign what metrics were important, what metrics would help us make decisions. And we landed on the due diligence index, which I think would just have to be a whole 'nother podcast talk, there's a lot to go into there. We did critical control work insights, which is a process of evolving our behavior-based safety observations, which we all know and have used for many, many years, to this idea that we have the work as imagined, we think work happens like this, it's like a steady black line, and then we have the work as done, which looks very, very different to work as imagined.

And that's a blue line that's sort of going up and down. And sometimes that blue line starts to drift from the black line, which could mean innovation, or it could mean that we're drifting into failure. And perhaps a fatality or a serious incident or events going to occur, which we don't want. So it's about discovering the gap between the work as imagined and the work as done. So that's a little process that we designed for any worker or leader to go into the field and find out where those gaps are, both helpful and hindering.

Learning teams is an alternative investigation methodology to your typical ones, like TapRooT and ICAM. And that's the process where you bring in your frontline workers, and just your frontline workers, don't bring anyone else in. And give them the space and the safety, the psychological safety, to really share about what happens out there with the blue line, with the work as done.

And what might have been some of the systemic factors that contributed to an event occurring. Because sometimes investigations can be really threatening for people, they feel like they're going to lose their job. You get everything but the real story of what actually has happened or gone on. And so this is just a really great methodology for finding out some of those factors that contributed to events, which means whatever your corrective actions are, they're more likely to then actually improve the workplace and prevent incidents in the future.

And tying in with that, probably one of my favorites, is just culture, just restorative culture. So we very much had a culture of blame and lack of trust. And I really was...I was so passionate in shifting that and I still am in any organization. So shifting from a highly retributive culture to more of a restorative just culture that's based on trust and accountability.

And, again, each of those, Mary, as I've touched on, are big chunky projects that we could probably spend an hour on each, right. But that just sort of gives you a little bit of a snapshot. I think all of those initiatives are important, though, because they really underpin so much of how we do safety in organizations. So even just picking off a couple and doing them will certainly give you a lot of traction and bang for your buck.

Yeah, definitely.

- And despite the fact that they came from a specific place, a specific review, it sounds to me like they're quite universal. Not necessarily, I mean, like you said, not every...maybe the safety culture is not punitive, and therefore, the restorative factor is not so big. But yeah, I think it's valuable to our listeners to hear those different themes. And I'm sure the wheels are turning about how those relate to their own experiences.

So in this entire process, what do you think was crucial? Where did you make mistakes? How would you do things differently? I know those are big questions, but.

- I like to live my life in hindsight, Mary, and I always think back, you know, I'm probably a little bit hard on myself, and think back and go, "Oh, gosh, I really should have done that differently," in hindsight, right. Hindsights are wonderful, but sometimes not a very nice teacher. But certainly, yeah, the best we can do as safety practitioners is, you know, look back and reflect and look back at ourselves, you know, reflect on, "Okay, this is what I learned from that, that's what I'll do differently next time."

So, yeah, there's... Look, a lot has worked well in these processes that I've gone through. But certainly, along the way, of course, you evolve and you learn, you do better. So what would I do differently? Definitely, I would spend more time early on with the people who aren't aligned with the change. So, you know, you've bought in your compelling case for change, and you've got a roadmap that your executive are going to sign off on on what we're going to do differently.

But somewhere in there, you'll have people who perhaps are threatened by that, perhaps they don't understand it, therefore, don't agree with it. Perhaps they operate from a different paradigm about safety. So let's say, for example, that you're moving away from zero harm as a statistical outcome or even an ethical outcome, let's say you're just getting rid of it, you're moving to a new safety vision, they might not like that.

They might think zero harm is the best ever and want to keep it. I know you could apply many examples there. So I would most definitely spend more time in what we call humble inquiry, understanding their world, understanding how they think, their assumptions, their belief systems, understanding their objections, and what they think is important.

And, you know, at times when, you know, things are just rolling along, it's maybe easy not to do that because, you know, it's hard work. But I think it's essential to bring them along on their change journey. Otherwise, as John Kotter says, they can very much derail the process, every single point. And so you're halfway down the road, and this person is derailing it in whichever way they can, and you're like, "Oh, this is not going well."

So I think certainly spending that time early on. So I've got a little story about when I didn't do that. I had an individual, his name was John. And I think he was from our risk team, and he just wasn't aligned with the change. And I would be in the training program that I designed, and he was really, really vocal and not entirely helpful to the rest of the participants.

So what we did was we just got alongside him and wanted to understand him. And we really invited that dialog. And he ended up becoming one of the biggest supporters of the change. So he came along to one of the programs, he's like, it was almost like he had this lightbulb moment, this epiphany of, "Okay, I can see where you're going now." But had I not done that, he just would have probably, you know, dug that trench even deeper. So it's certainly worth doing that.

The other thing that I would...a big learning, what I would do differently is just to make sure I have those backend systems and processes built first. So for example, we were moving to the new investigation methodology called learning teams and the new work insights process. And I introduced it, and I'd sort of built the model. And then I had these people come and go, "Right, let's go, let's do it. Kym, where do I record it? Where do we put this? How do we track how many we've done? How do we track our corrective actions?"

And I was like, "Okay, I'm really not overly a systems person, I clearly need to become one." So, thankfully, I had a wonderful gentleman by the name of Scott on my team, who said, "Kym, right, we need to get the backend system going really quick. We need a prototype, a little sandbox for them to play in and trail this out and start to record it." And some people, they want the form. "Kym where's the form for doing this?" "There is no form."

So that was a big learning for me, is to sort of preempt this change that you've got coming, what does that mean in terms of your backend systems and your reporting, and so on and so forth. So I just would have probably been helpful had I done that sooner as opposed to doing it after the fact. [inaudible] one more thing, sorry. The other big learning is around the legislation. So clearly, you know, all organizations across the globe, we have a legislative duty and responsibility to ensure a safe workplace.

And some people think when you start doing this more human-centered approach to safety, that it means that you're throwing the legislation out, which couldn't be further from the truth. So I would embed everything back to due diligence obligations. So in Australia, we have six elements of due diligence, which would be similar across the globe. Really pull it back to an executive's due diligence obligations and show them and demonstrate to them how this change that we're taking to take more of a human-centered approach is actually going to strengthen our legislative compliance and how they meet their due diligence obligations.

Because otherwise, people can really start to get worried and it can really derail the change because they think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which, of course, we would never do. All we're doing is moving from compliance, to leading, to resilient. So we're building on it, not necessarily in linear fashion. We're certainly not throwing out our traditional ways of doing safety necessarily. We're just modifying them but still keeping our compliance legislation there.

- It sounds like that's a bit of an assumption, that, you know, the legislation is, you know, this is what it says and this is the only way to do it, when in fact, often there are multiple approaches, and I think it's worth it to step back and look at the spirit of the legislation. Obviously, the literal technical things as well.

But yeah, I mean, a great example of that was the risk assessment change, where it's like, okay, it doesn't technically say that we need to write it down, except in certain cases. And the spirit of this was actually sort of renewed with the new approach. So I have a few questions that I like to ask every guest at the end, they're just some fun questions.

The first one I'm going to call the University of Kym. If you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum, where would you start? So what core human skills do you think are the most important to develop in tomorrow's safety professionals?

- I like the question. I'm not sure if people are going to come to the University of Kym, but definitely, a core skill would be influence. So currently, I work in a decentralized structure. So I have a small team, but the rest of the safety resources don't actually report to me that are out in the business units, right. So I can't actually say, "Hey, go do X Y Z," because they report to a managing director.

So that means, then, that, you know, I need to be very good at influencing without authority. And that can be really hard for safety professionals, right? So I think I would definitely have that core skill in there. And even if they did report to you, you know, the managing directors or...you know, and all your stakeholders don't, obviously.

So you need to be influencing a multiple number of stakeholders without the authority, perhaps. So influencing skills, definitely. I would also then say communication, being able to communicate to all levels of the organization. And that could be the frontline worker who's out there who's been on the tools his or her whole life, you know, how do you relate to them?

How do you engage them? How do you understand their world? To then being able to do quite a complex presentation to board members who, you know, are obviously very, very strong, very intelligent, and really know their stuff and may not necessarily agree with you. So communication. Consultation goes without saying, consultation and collaboration. How do we work with all parts of the organization to collaborate and co-design?

And I think that's a real skill in itself. I'm going to throw a bit of a curveball one out here. I would say, you know, how in safety do we also have fun? How do we make this topic engaging and fun, and, you know, where we can, inject a little bit of humor or reverence because it can be a really boring, dry topic at times.

Now, that's not to undermine and say that it's not a serious topic, because it is. You know, we have fatalities in our industry, which are tragic and we really want to avoid, so at times, it can be serious. But where possible, can we make it and inject a little bit of fun into this so that it's more engaging to people and it's not just condescending in a way?

That it's actually...you know, this is almost like changing the branding of safety, isn't it? A little bit more like how we brand sustainability environment, it's got a little bit of hope and a bit of future focus as opposed to this, you know, compliance and policing. Yes, that's what the University of Kym would have in it.

- You would tackle the authority problem, the brand management of the view of safety is just dictatorial, for lack of a better term. Okay, so here's another one. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of...you can choose at the beginning of your career or the beginning of your safety career.

Really, you can choose any point, I'm not going to know any differently. And you could only give young Kym one piece of advice, what would it be?

- Oh, I love that question. So what would it be? Well, I've worked in safety my whole career. So it would be most definitely go and work internationally, you know, and really enjoy the experience. And, you know, find...you know, it's so wonderful working in different cultures and going to different countries and seeing how different countries approach safety and also approach work really in general.

And in doing that, it would help "young Kym" see that humans are humans. You know, there's so much commonality around the world regardless of where that human lives and resides and in what culture. And so the challenges that you might face in Yellowknife might be similar to the challenges that worker in Fiji might face, or in Newman in Western Australia.

There are some real common...you know, there's common commonalities. There are some real common themes with humans. And I think that one of those themes is that humans are really complex. We are not simple creatures, we have so much complexity going on around, you know, in our heads.

And that means that when you do safety and you approach safety inside your organization, you always need to remember that humans are complex. So that would probably be the advice. Humans are complex, don't try to fight it, roll with it, understand it, embrace that humans are complex. And keep that in mind when you're actually, you know, doing your job and trying to do it well. I might go to tell my kids that now, Mary.

I might go give them that advice.

- Oh, good, good. Write it down.

- That's right.

- Yeah. In the end, really, if humans were not complex, then someone would have figured it out by now, right? There would be some magical formula, and, you know, we wouldn't be having this discussion. So now let's get practical. This is where I ask our guests for their best and most practical tips or resources for safety managers who are looking to improve work relationships and core skills.

Now, you've actually mentioned quite a few, but it could be a book, a website, a concept. What would you, I guess, recommend to someone who's sort of just getting into this more human-centered approach?

- Sure, so actually, in my other office, in my house, here, Mary, I've got a bookcase, and I could just, you know, be flicking books, you know, for the next 10 minutes of what to read. So I'll do my best not to bore your listeners by going on too much. But I would start with any book written by Professor Sidney Decker. His books are so beautifully written, they're just incredible, they will blow your mind.

I would start with The Field Guide for Safety, I think it's called. If you find his writing a little bit hard to take in at first, that's okay, just, you know, stick with it because eventually, you'll get used to his writing. Any book by Todd Conklin. The whole series, "Due Diligence" series, by Michael Tooma, who I mentioned is a safety lawyer. He's written these great very thin books which, you know, you can read quickly on a whole bunch of different safety topics, from asbestos management, to COVID, to all of the due diligence obligations that exist out there.

You know, there's David Woods's books, you know, "Behind Human Error." So it's just this wealth of really great textbooks out there. I would also look for all the Dave Provan and Drew Rae's published research. And, again, with Sidney Decker. And podcasts, I am a big fan of "The Safety of Work" podcast by Dave and Drew, because they take research and they unpack it in a really practical, pragmatic way.

And there's actually quite a few safety podcasts out there, I'm sure I'm going to miss a couple. But there's quite a few that are very popular right now that listeners can grab ahold of. And I'll do a shameless plug here for a book that I had the pleasure of writing the book foreword for, which has just been released. I just posted on LinkedIn about it today, which is "How to Do Safety Differently" by Sidney Dekker and Todd Conklin.

I wrote the first two pages, Mary. So I'm sure they will be the best two pages of the book.

- Awesome.

- Just kidding. Just kidding.

- Of course. Of course.

- Of course, goes without saying. But yeah, that book is really good because it gives a practical guide on how to take a human-centered approach, you know, using these principles that people are the solution and that safety is an ethical responsibility. And that we can learn from what goes right, not just from what goes wrong. So there are a couple of things that people can...you know, if they can't find those books, just contact me and I'll point you in the right direction.

- Which leads right into my next question, which is, where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Sure. So they can find me on LinkedIn. I actually have a nice little collaboration with Dr. Tristan Casey called New View Safety. And so we've got a couple of programs that we'll be rolling out in our spare time, which people might be interested in, which talks about the change management process that you and I have spoken about today.

So hopefully, that's okay to do that little shameless plug. But yeah, I'm on LinkedIn so people...yeah...

- Of course.

- ...I always love to meet new people and talk to people. So yeah, people can reach out and connect if they'd like to.

- Excellent. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Kym. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in.

- Thank you so much, Mary, it's been wonderful chatting. ♪ [music] ♪ - Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe. ♪

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